Services

Instructors:

Christopher Hench is a PhD student in German Literature and Culture and Medieval Studies. Christopher’s research interests are primarily in medieval epics and love poetry, the intersection of economic thinking and literature, and the tools of the Digital Humanities. One project he is currently working on involves developing a computational approach to syllabifying historical languages and predicting meter. He hopes to discover medieval poets' unique use of sound in language.

Nick is a sociologist and fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. At the D-Lab, Nick served as a consultant and instructor on text analysis and research management. His research work focuses on governance and the use of force, and innovates new text analysis approaches. He is currently leading a data science team creating software to generate large, complex, and transparent databases via researcher-directed crowd annotation and machine learning.

This semester's TextXD event will be our biggest yet! With so much going on in the world of natural language processing, we’ve opened TextXD to researchers beyond the UC Berkeley campus. We'll have short morning talks on new tools, methods, software, and data. Speakers will come from our own campus as well as UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, Princeton, and Drexel. We're also introducing afternoon "make" sessions so that we can roll up our sleeves and spend a couple hours working together to craft solutions to our shared problems or to investigate research questions of shared interest. The text data we’ll use in these "make" sessions will include newspaper articles, twitter feeds, emails, congressional hearings, and journal article abstracts.

Additionally, this year we’re starting with a preXD Workshop on November 29 from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. to give a quick introduction to text analysis in Python using Jupyter Notebooks. This is specifically designed to bring people to the text-analysis-starting-line so everyone will be ready for the make sessions. No prior text analysis experience is needed to attend the preXD. For those without Python familiarity, it would be useful to checkout some introductory materials from UC Berkeley’s D-Lab here: https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/python-fundamentals. Click the “launch binder” black and red badge to run it all in your browser.